Friday, September 15, 2006

Stop the clock

Yesterday I was furious that there was no mention on CBC or in any newspaper of the Canada/US "deep integration" conference wrapping up today in Banff. One would have thought that the occasion of Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Canada would have rated at least a one-liner somewhere.

"This is how the future of North America now promises to be written: not in a sweeping trade agreement on which elections will turn, but by the accretion of hundreds of incremental changes implemented by executive agencies, bureaucracies and regulators. "We've decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes," says Covais. "Because we won't get anywhere." "

"The guidance from the ministers was, 'tell us what we need to do and we'll make it happen,' " recalls Covais, who chairs the U.S. section of the council, which includes 10 CEOs of big companies like Wal-Mart, General Motors and Merck."

"Covais figures they've got less than two years of political will to make it happen. That's when the Bush administration exits, and "The clock will stop if the Harper minority government falls or a new government is elected." "That's Ron Covais - President of the Americas for Lockheed Martin, a former Pentagon adviser to Dick Cheney and Chair of the US section of the North American Competitiveness Council created during the Harper/Bush Cancun meet in March.He made these remarks following the last deep integration conference in Washington in June.The objective of the current Banff conference is to draw up a list of recommendations for ministers of "Canada's New Government" for the reopening of parliament in October.

Stop the clock. Stop it any way you can.Write to the CBC, national newspapers, your MLA.

It may be inevitable/necessary/natural that one day we will see a North America union with one coin, one flag, one defense perimeter, one education system, one health care system, one energy resource pool, etc.Opposition to this idea in Canada is often spun as anti-Americanism by its corporate sponsors and their government flacks.It isn't. It's anti-corporatism. And most Americans agree with us.

I had been wondering what happened. Looks like they've all learned the WTO Lesson -- "we know nothing. Nothing!"Sometime around 1995, the World Trade Organization announced it was going to massively globalize everybody's trade rules but no one should have any concerns at all, at all, everything was going to be just fine. I remember reading the article in the paper and thinking, Uh oh, not so fast. I guess everybody else read the article, too -- hence, massive protests etc, etc. So now I think our fearless leaders are trying to do all this stuff on the QT, fly it all "under the radar" so to speak.Creekside, thanks for saying "not so fast" and alerting the rest of us to this.